The technology relates to data warehousing facilities which include many racks of computer servers. Such data warehousing facilities are used by many companies to provide online computer services.
In a typical data warehouse facility, many racks of computer servers are located inside an environmentally controlled room. The data warehouse facility includes a power and data distribution system to provide electrical power and data connections to all the servers. Further, the data warehouse facility will typically include powerful cooling systems to ensure that the ambient temperature within the data facility is kept at a desirably low temperature.
The vast majority of rack mountable servers cool their electrical components with cooling fans. The cooling fans of most computer servers draw cooling air into the front of the server enclosure, the air passes over the electrical components within the server to cool the electrical components, and the airflow is ultimately vented from the rear of the server enclosure. When many servers are all operating in the same space, the servers produce a great deal of heated air. The data warehouse facility must remove this heat from the space in order to ensure that all the servers remain at a desirably low temperature.
Typically the environmental control systems in a data warehouse facility are designed to keep the entire interior space of the data warehouse facility at a temperature that ensures that the equipment most sensitive to overheating is provided with air at a sufficiently low temperature to prevent such overheating. However, much of the equipment located in such a facility does not require air at that same low temperature. In fact, it is often the case that much of the equipment in a data warehouse facility could operate normally if provided with air at considerably higher ambient temperatures. Nevertheless, the air is maintained at the lower temperatures to accommodate the more sensitive equipment.
Because the processing requirements of a computer services company can vary over time, it is often necessary for a company to add or remove servers from a particular data warehouse so that the number of installed servers matches the current processing requirements. Adding servers can be accomplished in various ways.
In some instances, new racks with new servers are permanently installed in a data warehouse. However, if the data processing requirements at that data warehouse later decrease, the newly installed servers and associated power and cooling distribution systems can represent unused overhead.
To address varying processing demands, attempts have been made to provide data warehousing facilities with temporarily mounted server equipment. The temporarily mounted equipment can later be removed if the processing needs at a facility decrease. Also, temporarily mounted equipment can be moved from a facility where the data processing needs have decreased to a second facility where the data processing needs have increased. Thus, temporarily mounted server systems can be moved to various facilities on an as-needed basis.
One way this is accomplished is to mount a plurality of racks of servers inside a traditional shipping container. The shipping container itself can be easily moved to a desired location where there is a need for additional data processing capabilities. The racks of servers are mounted inside standard shipping containers because existing transportation services, such as trains, trucks and ships, are already designed to handle standard shipping containers.
Whenever it is necessary to add additional data processing capability to a data warehousing facility, one simply moves a shipping container with racks of servers into the data warehousing facility. The servers are then connected to power and data lines.
Existing transportable shipping containers containing racks of servers cool the servers in one of two ways. In some instances, cooled air produced by the environmental control system in the warehouse facility is used to cool the servers. This means that the servers in a shipping container vent heated air into the ambient atmosphere in the data warehousing facility. The environmental control system in the facility must then remove the heat generated by the servers in the shipping container.
Alternatively, a shipping container may include heat exchangers that utilize cooling water from an external source to remove heat produced by the servers. In this instance, the data warehouse facility must provide a supply of cooling water.
To ensure that a data warehouse facility is capable of cooling all servers in the facility, the cooling equipment in the data warehouse must be configured to cool the total number of servers that could ultimately be located inside the warehouse. If, at any given time, the warehouse is not full of servers, there will be excess unused cooling capacity. This can result in inefficient cooling for the number of servers that are actually present. In addition, this can require the purchase, installation and maintenance of cooling equipment that is never used, because the warehouse is never scaled up to full capacity.
As noted above, in some instances, a transportable shipping container may have a fluid cooling system that is designed to help cool the servers mounted in the shipping container using an external source of cooling water. In this instance, the data warehousing facility must be capable of providing a sufficient amount of cooling fluid to cool all the servers that could possibly be located in the warehouse. If the facility is not fully populated, this too can result in unused overcapacity.
Many shipping containers full of rack mounted servers will include multiple access panels located in the exterior walls of the shipping container. In some instances, the access panels can be removed to provide maintenance access the rear of the racks, and to the rear of the servers mounted within the racks. If the servers rely upon ambient air cooling, it may even be necessary to remove the access panels so that the air blown out of the rear of the servers can be vented into the atmosphere in the data warehouse facility. This would mean that the access panels must be removed in order to operate the servers and to allow them to cool themselves.
Because these types of transportable shipping containers are typically located inside a data warehousing facility, it is acceptable to remove the access panels in the exterior walls of the shipping container, to thereby expose the rear of the racks and the servers. Because the container and the servers are located inside a warehouse, the servers are not exposed to a harmful environment.
In some instances, it may be desirable to locate a shipping container of servers outdoors. In this instance, removing the access panels on the exterior walls of a shipping container might expose the servers to harmful environmental conditions. And if the environmental conditions outside the shipping container are harmful, it may be impossible to operate the servers or to perform certain maintenance operations without damaging the servers. This means that such a shipping container may not be usable in certain outdoor environments.
Another problem with locating such a shipping container outside a data warehouse relates to the cooling requirements of the servers. As noted above, many shipping containers do not include any cooling equipment. If the servers rely upon air cooling alone, the ambient temperature surrounding the shipping container must be at a sufficiently low temperature to ensure that the servers can be operated without damage. Thus, it may be impossible to operate such a shipping container in a location with a high ambient temperature.
If such a shipping container relies upon an external source of cooling water, the shipping container could be located only where there is a good external source of cooling water. This could be accomplished by locating the container adjacent a river or a lake and using that water for cooling. Alternatively, if there is no natural body of water that can be used for cooling, it will be necessary to provide equipment, such as cooling towers, to remove heat from water that is circulated to the servers for cooling.
The shipping containers described above are usually fully populated with racks of servers. In other words, when a data warehousing facility wishes to increase its data processing capabilities, the data warehousing facility will typically add an entire shipping container full of rack-mounted servers. This often results in the provision of significantly more processing capability than is required. There is no provision with the existing shipping containers with rack-mounted servers to only partially populate the space within the shipping container.